Re: It is indeed, a very sad day...

On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 01:46:05PM -0400, Jef Spaleta wrote:
>
> I thought there were some technical changes Redhat made to how some
> internals work in kde as far as I can gather.  Hacking in vfolder
> support for one....and its not clear to me that the changes redhat
> hacked created some new buggy behavior.

vfolder support was to enable application .desktop file browsing in
konqueror.  This was implemented as a kioslave, so should not affect
stability in any way.

> Whether or not the packages redhat is shipping are crippled in some
> new way is up in the air since there could be some unresolved bugs
> in the new code.

Right.  There is still concern over the Xft patches to Qt, for
example.  Other changes we were making to help unify things like the
.desktop files between KDE and GNOME included appending kde- or gnome-
to .desktop files that were provided with those desktops, in order to
provide some name space to avoid name collisions.  Unfortunately, KDE
uses the name of the .desktop file to start KServices.  See
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=74071 for details.

> But its clearly not redhat's intent to cripple kde....or else they
> wouldn't have made so much effort to have gnome have kde-ish icons.

Well, we would like to think that the icons look like Red Hat icons,
but hey. ;-).

> I found a run down of some things Redhat's modifications have
> changed in a kde mailing list and some of the effects, right when
> this all exploded on /...but I can't find the right url
> now...grrr.... i'll keep trying to dig it up.

There were some valid complaints there.  We did our best to address
as many of them as possible.

> To me the real question as to how "crippled" Redhat's KDE its going to
> be is to see to what amount of extra effort 3rd party application
> builders have to use to create Redhat KDE specific packages.  But its
> not a good omen politically to see a developer leave redhat over
> this...I can't see how this is going to help move the camps towards a
> resolution in the long term.

One thing I want to mention is that Bero's departure doesn't remove
100% of internal KDE advocacy and development at Red Hat.  Rumors have
circulated that only Bero ever worked on KDE at Red Hat, and this is
not true.  Even I was hacking Qt and kwin themes at wee hours of the
morning to try to have KDE match our desktop look.  I wasn't 100%
satisfied with our efforts on KDE, and I hope we can fix that in the
near future.

Cheers,

Matt